What you won’t read.  Quick maths to see how much capacity the 24 will lose when shiny new Borismasters take over in June:

Current:

PVR 27 (buses on the road at peak time) Current mix of buses: 5: H39/21D Volvo B5L / Wrightbus Gemini 2 hybrid double deckers (VWH’s) 24: H39/23D Volvo B9TL / Wrightbus Gemini 2 [...]

Thanks to Simon Harris of ITV for taking and tweeting this picture:

We can now confirm the maths in the previous post and say that contrary to what Boris and TfL have been saying for years they’ve just spunked £212m on a 600 buses which carry 9% fewer passengers than a regular off the [...]

Prompted by @tomburke999 on Twitter, I’ve worked out the cost per passenger of the New Bus compared to a notional* 87-passenger £300k hybrid:

8 pre-production buses of 77 capacity – £11m 600 production buses of 80 capacity (so far) – £212m Total 608 buses at £223m including development costs (which we’re assuming won’t ever [...]

I put in an FoI request back in January for the in service fuel consumption for the prototype New Bus for London, as I’m fairly certain its weight problem will mean it’s a bit higher than expected (and certainly not the 11.6mpg spun to the press, which was a test track figure).

TfL’s response [...]

Sorry about the Daily Mail-style headline, but this tale is a wonderful tribute to the power of digital photography.

First a quick recap of events since the original revelation of the New Bus for London’s substantial weight problem, TfL’s attempts to cover this up, the spying trip and the eventual grudging acceptance [...]

In the Evening Isvestia:

The claims provoked an immediate response from Mayor Boris Johnson, who said: “If Paris is seen as the city of light it must be plugged into the London grid.

“Ours is the real capital of culture, the arts and fashion — a vibrant, diverse and welcoming city steeped in history.”

[...]

Most of this post was prepared around a year ago, before the current Toby Helm investigations into the startlingly bad DfE spin and smear Twitter account @toryeducation started. I never finished it because I never felt it was quite there as a post rather than a set of idle notes about something I found mildly [...]

There’ll be a shit storm tomorrow about Boris’s apparent conversion to Delingpole/Brooker climate change denial, but in reality it’s business as usual – he’s trolling both sides while having no real position, as he’s done before on, oo, hundreds of things, selective schooling being one that springs to mind.  If you think Boris is [...]

Driverless tube trains, previously touched on here and recently by Tim Fenton, Tom Edwards and a frequent hobby-horse of our old friend Andrew Gilligoon here, are Boris’s Stalinist answer to industrial relations – ‘No man, no problem’.  Unfortunately it’s also ‘No clue’, as the response to a recent FoI of [...]

When TfL answered my original FoI with commendable speed I was all ready to praise them, until further analysis of the figures and Helen’s trip to Birmingham showed that they couldn’t possibly be right.  They’ve now owned up:

We have provided the below response to your request for information recently.

However, we have since become aware [...]